Pandas love the mountains and snow. Mount Hood, in the picture, is near my home in Oregon.

Saturday, February 27, 2016

Simple -- but not Easy

It is not always easy to make a new habit.

In fact, it is seldom easy, even though it may be simple.

One may ask why, (if I really truly want to create a new habit), it would be hard to do. Gretchen Rubin, in her book Better Than Before - Change Your Habits, change Your Life, helps me understand myself better, and answers why. Better yet, she lays out the "HOW", step by step, with notes on pitfalls to avoid and what to do when I fail.

Failing, it turns out, is part of change. One reason I love Gretchen is her candid notes on her own attempts to change. She sees a failure as a clue to success, an arrow pointing to an as yet unrecognized challenge that will be analyzed and overcome.

Adopting the tools Gretchen recommends is helping me to also adopt her attitude towards a lapse in my effort to create new habits. A major tool, monitoring my progress, not only shows me where I lapse, it shows me where I succeed.

So far, I'm sticking to my diet six days out of seven the past week, practicing oral hygiene daily but not as many times as my goal, blogging most days but not every day and practicing origami not at all which makes me think it is not important enough to me at this time. A mixed report card, not "straight A's", which is fine because the goal is not perfection, the goal is change, and that is most definitely occurring. Daily.